A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester

It started with the find of a broken bottle in a garden on Wilton Road.

The lost and found bottle, 2023

My friend Declan wrote “Hi Andrew. Neighbours have builders in digging trenches for an extension. They unearthed an old glass bottle, possibly discarded when the houses were being built in the 1890’s?”

The shop on Beech Road, 1900s

It carries the name Mason and Burrows.

Now, I can date the house to between 1894 and 1903 when the property was occupied by a William Simpson.

And it may just be possible that he or a subsequent resident bought the bottle from a branch of Mason and Burrows “grocers & wine & spirit Merchants”.*

In 1895 they had shops on Moss Lane, Great Western Street and  Moss Lane East, and by 1911 had expanded further south to Stockport Road, 23 Wilbraham Road and 46 Beech Road.

The romantic un historian bit of me would like the bottle to have come from the Beech Road offi, which continued selling beer, wine, and tobacco into the 2000s before opening as "Espicerie Ludo, Wine Merchant and Fine Groceries”.

And as you do, I went looking for them.  So far, I have tracked them back to 1886 to Sun Entry, which was a small street off Cock Pit Hill and Bull’s Head Yard which was part of a warren of narrow streets and closed courts bounded by Corporation Street, Market Place and Market Street.

Sun Entry, 1886

They had a Dickensian feel, and non-more so that Sun Entry which snaked down from Cock Pitt Hill towards Market Street becoming progressively narrower till it ended as an enclosed passageway.

The area was already in existence by 1793 and elements show up on Tinker’s map a full 21 years earlier.

There will be a few people who remember the area before its demolition in the late 1960s which was replaced by that modernistic complex which included the Marks and Spencer store with its wavey canopy.

I wish I had known that older Manchester and walked the alleys’ and entrances.

In the 1880s Mason and Burrows occupied a large premises which fronted both Bulls’s Head Yard and Sun Entry and may have shared the “arched beer cellars” which extended down to the small and equally narrow Hopewood Avenue.

Sun Entry from Cock Pitt Hill, 1910

There is more but I suspect the historic record is not up to revealing the secret of the number on the base of the bottle which was 1302. It may be a reference to a batch or to one of the products they sold.

Bottle bottom with a number, 2023

But unless we can have access to one of their catalogues, I fear that number 1302 will remain in the shadows.

Still, I like the way that on a sunny day in Chorlton the story took us back into the late 18th century in one of those lost and now largely forgotten bits of the city.

Location; Wilton Road, Sun Entry and Bulls Head Yard

Pictures; the lost Mason and Burrows bottle 2023, Mason Burrrows shop, Beech Road circa 1900s Sun Entry, 1886, from Goad’s Fire Insurance Maps, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Sun Entry, from Cock Pit Hill, City Engineers, 1902,and in 1944, City Planners 05914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Sun Entry narrows towards, Market Street, 1944

* Mason and Burrows, Slater’s Manchester & Salford Directory, 1895

Lost Woolwich .......... no 4 a football team

Now of all the places I knew in my youth I have to say Woolwich is one of those that has  undergone some of the most radical change.

So much so that big chunks of it I have difficulty recognising.

The Arsenal, Powis Street and even the old Pie and Mash shop were as familiar to me as they were to generations of people who grew up in Woolwich and are now just distant memories.

So with that in mind I have returned to images of a time before now.

And so here for those in my family like Geoff who follows Charlton, the odd couple who watch Millwall and Colin and Lee who travel over the river is that local football team from 1905.

Picture; from Woolwich Through Time, Kristina Bedford, Amberley 2014

That amazing Mr Banks ....... his pictures and other practitioners of his trade

Now I remain fascinated by what can turn up in an old cupboard, under the floor boards or in this case the family picture album.

And for what follows I have my old friend Oliver Bailey to thank, who having read the story on the photographer, Robert Banks, sent up a selection of the trade cards which accompanied some of the family pictures.

Oliver told me that "glancing through your blog on I saw the name Banks, which rang a bell as he was one of many that took photos of different branches of the family and I attach copies of mountings he used plus a list of all the practitioners of the art that the family used".

All of which was a find indeed.

Mr Banks was born in 1847, his father was a journeyman carpenter, and at fifteen he was employed as a woollen piercer in Upper Mill.  At the age of twenty he was an illustrated artist working for the Oldham Chronicle and in 1867 had set up as a photographer in the High Street at Uppermill.

From there he set up in Manchester, was employed to take family photographs, and went out on to the streets of the city to record what he saw.

He was commissioned by the Corporation in 1878 to photograph a series of pictures of the newly opened Town Hall and went on to compile sets of albums including the opening of the Ship Canal, the unveiling of Queen Victoria’s statue, and King Edward’s visit in 1909.

The mountings on the back of Oliver’s family photographs record the growing success of Mr Banks who by degree began opening studios across the city and beyond including Blackpool.

Along with these cards, Oliver provided a list of 35 other photographers, many of whom were working outside Manchester and include places ranging from Todmorden, Southport, Rochdale, Pendleton, Halifax and Burnley.

At which point I will have to go back to Oliver and enquire as to how so many far flung photographers were snapping the family.  I suppose the explanation for some like Southport, Hollingworth Lakes, and Douglas in the Isle of Man will be holiday opportunities, But Sierra Leone will throw up a story.

The list is a treasure trove, because it offers the chance to pursue the careers of each of these picture takers.
I know the Manchester ones will be there in the local directories which I have but the ‘out of town’ ones are all new to me and over time I will pursue them.

Just leaving me to thank Oliver, whose family farmed in Chorlton from the 1760s.

Location; everywhere






Pictures, trade cards from Robert Banks, late 19th, early 20th centuries, from the collection of Oliver Bailey

Heaps of cars … missing trains ….. and Central Railway Station in colour

I missed the end of Central Railway Station by just a couple of months, and it was not for another decade that I stumbled across the place.

By then it had become a car park which I suppose was a bit of an insult although I guess most of those who parked up there thought it was a convenient use for that former grand terminus.

I can still remember marvelling at how impressive it still was with that giant wall of glass where the platforms almost ended.

Back then I mostly did black and white pictures and rarely did colour which is why most of my photographs of Central Railway Station are monochrome.

But occasionally I did venture into colour slides and recently began converting them into digital images.

Alas many suffered from over four decades in our cellar and the quality of them is iffy.

But there is enough to bring back to life that time in 1979 when armed with two cameras I wandered along the platforms, looking down on the parked cars and the slowly deteriorating remnants of station offices and other railway furniture.

Now there are plenty of pictures of Central after the trains left, but these are mine.

I have to confess that those I took in black and white are better, but here are some of the lost colour ones.

But  then as you do I decided to throw in some of the others and that really is it.

Location; Manchester Central Railway Station

Pictures; after the trains left, Manchester Central, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth, a chance conversation and a story revealed

Now it is another one of those stories I thought had come to an end, but the Twilight Sleep Home at Westonby on Edge Lane has popped up again.*

Westonby is a big Edwardian pile on the edge of Chorlton which was built in 1903 and was grand enough to have been “cellared throughout contains three well-lighted entertaining rooms; billiard-room spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom, and separate w.c, lavatory and w.c on ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden........ contains 3,074 square yards or thereabouts and has a frontage of about 200 feet on Edge Lane.”**

All of which made it an attractive place to live, but sometime around 1922 it had become the Old Trafford Twilight Sleep Home.  Not I grant you the zippiest of names and one with feint comic overtones  which opened a new field or research.  For on the same page of classified adverts was another Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.

It is an odd name and takes you back to one of those fashionable medical practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and centred on the attempt to find a painless way for giving birth.

The standard approach had been to administer chloroform but in Germany experiements had been undertaken to see if women could give birth while asleep.  The mother was given a mix of morphine and scopolamine and early results were so promising that by the early 20th century the method had been adopted in the USA and Canada.

Our own Twilight Sleep Home opened in 1917 on Henrietta Street in Old Trafford and moved to Westonby sometime in 1921 or early 1922.  It advertised itself as offering “Painless Childbirth” and featured regularly in the classified section of the Manchester Guardian until 1927.  During those ten years it’s name varied slightly but always retained Twilight Sleep.

And last night in a chance conversation I discovered someone who had been there and given birth to a daughter.  The woman is now in her mid 90s and so this will place the birth sometime in the 1940s which was later than I had thought.

The Westonby home does not feature after 1927 but its competitor on Upper Chorlton Road was still advertsining in 1936 after which it too vanished.

The answer might lie in the loss of faith in the medical practice.  As early as 1915 there had been deaths associated with the method and much mainstream medical opinion was at best luke warm. There were also stories of poor quality care and an absence of trained doctors and nurses as well as horror stories of women having to be strapped to the birthing beds.

It may also be that Westonby was too small it had only eleven rooms.  Then there would have been the cost.  I don’t have any figures yet but such care would not have come cheap and even though some nursing homes catered for poorer clients it is hard to see that this was a first choice for all but the comfortably well off.

Add to this by 1948 the Nationa Health Service may have made such places redundant.

Of course the key will be a conversation with the mother and a trawl of the street directories. My friend also remembered another Twilight Sleep Home somewhere in Trafford.

I have a feeling that Westonby has still more to reveal.

Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, 1905 and April 6 1926, and what might be Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs

* Westonby, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby
**Sales advert Manchester Guardian, 1905

The Woolwich I remember

I like this picture of Woolwich for lots or reasons, but not least because it is how I remember it with the buses negotiating their way past the market stalls and the crowds out looking for a bargain or just enjoying an afternoon in the square.

I have tried dating it but so far it is a pretty wide slot which starts at 1939 and runs through into the 1950s.

That said I don't think it will be later than 1960.

The key will be the bus which someone far more an expert than me will be able to identify.

I know it is an RT which were built for London Transport from 1939 onwards but they remained in service for decades.

Likewise it might be possible to date the make of the car and work out when it was registered but cars like buses have a habit of staying on the road for years which just leaves the building to our left in the main picture and the style of the clothes.

The directories will pinpoint the shop but men’s clothes remained fairly uniform from the 1930s well into the early 60s which just leaves the woman and her hat in the corner.

There is no evidence of blackout or other signs to link it to the war.
and the tram lines are missing so that I think will narrow it to the 1950s, which is just that bit more exciting given that this was the period I could have been there.*

All of that said it is quite clearly from a time well before now and what draws me to the photograph is the sheer bustle and the way the photographer  caught a moment

Pictures; Woolwich circa 1930s-50s, courtesy of Steve Bardrick.

* I just now await someone to put me right on tram routes through Woolwich.

Fish and chips on Richmond Street

This is Richmond Street forty-seven years ago.

Back then I still used it as a cut through from Minshull Street down to Chorlton Street and for a decade was a place I knew well.

I had washed up in the College of Commerce a decade earlier doing an arts degree along side trainee lawyers, accountants and heaps of night school courses. The place had just become part of newly created Manchester Polytechnic, although it still felt like a separate entity miles from the other two colleges.

And that may have increased our sense of isolation or independence which led to its irreverent nickname of the College of Knowledge.

Sadly those not in the know called it ColCom.

That said in the late 1960s and 70s the students Union had hosted some memorable groups which added to our sense of feeling a tad special.

I don’t remember the fish and chip shop, but I will have fallen across the café on Chorlton Street, which was never as popular as Bert’s its close rival on Whitworth Street.

The Minshull Street Courts are still there, although they closed briefly just a decade after I took the picture.

But all those untrendy, traditional little outlets like the transport cafés have gone, and with it a bit of my youth.

Location, Richmond and Canal Street

Pictures; Richmond and Canal Street, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson